Dr. Nathan Wolfe has an interesting job description. He hunts primate hunters in Cameroon, in an effort to head off global pandemics before they occur. He tracks bushmeat hunters, who are at a high risk of virus transmission due to their blood mixing with that of their prey. Diseases such as ebola virus and HIV came from primate origins, and made the species jump as the bodies of primates were butchered and their blood mingled with that of their predators. In fact, a paper published in the February issue of Nature stated that 60% of emerging human pathogens came from animals.
Dr. Wolfe gets blood samples from the hunters, whom he calls “sentinels” and tests for new animal diseases that they have been exposed to, to determine which emerging infectious diseases could pose the biggest threats to humans. ”If you find diseases before they’ve really emerged, you can control them early on, before you get a major epidemic,” says Wolfe.
This year, he started the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative (GVFI), a collaboration of more than 100 scientists in 9 countries. GVFI also follows other sentinel populations, such as people who receive frequent blood transfusions, and carries out research in field locations in China, Madagascar, Malaysia and Paraguay. Wolfe’s hope is that health organizations can spend less money and energy on vaccines and treatment drugs if diseases are caught early.
Google.org, Google’s philanthropic sector, will contribute $5.5 million to the initiative, to be matched by the Skoll Foundation for another $5.5 million. ”Nathan is going to be a rock star in this field,” saod Frank Rijsberman, a Google.org program director. ”We =have high hopes he’ll discover 5 to 10 new viruses within the next few years.” Already, Wolfe has discovered several viruses never before seen in humans, including retroviruses in the same family as HIV.
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